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Organic Traffic Versus Paid Traffic

Posted December 11th, 2009 by Spike

If you own a website, you have a shared need with every other website owner. Your website needs traffic. Website traffic is considered the one thing that can make or break your business by many internet gurus. Without people visiting your site (that’s what internet traffic is) you will never get them to buy your product, or click your link, or sign up for your newsletter.

Okay, so everyone knows they need traffic. The real question is how to get it. There are as many different techniques and philosophies on how to get traffic to your website. Some people feel that search engine traffic is best. They use special programs like SEO elite to optimize their site (look here for a full SEO Elite Review). Others feel that paid traffic is the best, like pay-per-click traffic from Adwords. (If you go that route, be sure to read the Adwords Help page).

Many of the techniques are fads. Some are suspicious. Others only are effective in certain countries. But in the end, most traffic to your site really comes down to two types: free (organic) traffic, or paid traffic.

There are internet experts who maintain that there is really no such thing as free traffic. They explain that all internet traffic costs you something – either money, time or work. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” to describe the term natural or organic traffic. Organic traffic is website traffic that you did not buy outright. Organic traffic can come from lots of places. It can come from search engine results like Google, Yahoo or Bing. Free visitors can come from natural links on other sites. Natural traffic can come when someone puts your website address directly into their browser. Maybe they heard about your website from a coworker, in a newspaper article or on a radio ad. All of these forms of traffic are natural traffic. They are also usually free in the sense that you don’t pay someone directly to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.

Paid traffic is exactly the opposite. It is website traffic you receive because you paid for it. This can be on a per-click basis from pay-per-click programs like Google Adwords or Microsoft Adcenter. Paid traffic can be from an ad you bought on a different website. Paid traffic can be from from people typing in your website url from a paid print ad in a magazine or newsletter. There are several other ways you can pay for website traffic.

So the question is, which is better? At first glance it may seem that the “free traffic” was better. In many cases it is. But free, or natural traffic takes time to establish. You see, after you first create a website, no one knows about it, so no one will put links on their site to yours. The search engines don’t know about your site either, so you won’t be displayed very high in the search results. Even viral marketing (word of mouth) takes time to gain momentum. When you buy an ad, you can usually start getting visitors to your site right away. Even though paid traffic costs money, you can usually you can make more money than the traffic costs. In that case, purchasing an ad is a lot better than waiting for your site to become profitable.

The best strategy, however, is to use (both|both free and paid traffic techniques|paid and free traffic techniques|both natural and purchased traffic methods} in combination with each other. If you have a new site, the first step is to construct a pay-per-click ad campaign to gain initial traffic. Gauge your paid traffic closely at first, and run some split tests to determine what works best. Especially test which words and phrases are leading to conversions and profits. Refine your ad campaign to include more profitable words and trim unprofitable keywords. Then, start optimizing your landing pages for the money key phrases and start a linking campaign using those profitable keywords and phrases as the hyperlink to specific pages on your site. Within 3 months to a year, you will be getting lots of traffic from both the paid and organic traffic sources.

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